Authentic Vs. synthetic content

ChatGPT is going to take the marketing world by a storm, so they promise (or warn us). During the last few months, it was impossible to ignore the hype and concerns that AI will replace us marketers.

People who have never written blog posts now produce dozens of them and newsletters are being generated in a snap. Even the visuals accompanying social media posts are now being generated by AI without having to search for a perfect stock photo.

And it makes sense. For years people have been telling us about the decline of written content. “no one reads long blog posts anymore; we write these are just for SEO…”. What they really mean is that no HUMAN is reading these, only robots (Google’s crawlers) so it doesn’t matter how well researched or written these pieces are, as long as these are long enough and contain all the required keywords. So slowly an surely content quality decline and content itself became more mechanic, and so less consumable by real people. This, coupled with the overall decline in human attention resulted in less people reading such content and shifting their attention to social media, video and short form video (Reels and Tiktok).

And now AI has come to save us. Our own robot can produce a huge number of written words that actually makes some sense.

But would these words be enjoyed by a human? And would this engine be able to generate non-repetitive content over time? I doubt it. My guess is that AI will just accelerate the decline of written word in marketing. Huge amounts of posts will be written, only to be consumed by robots, then repurposed and published again to feed them robots again, and again and again.

And people? Where would they go looking for content? My guess is that they will try to find an authentic voice within this cacophony. This could be an exceptional writer, but since AI can easily imitate any writing style, I imagine this will be in a form of video content. Yes- video can also be generated by computers (even emulating real people by using “deep fake” technology) but I don’t think a computer will be able to replace a human standing in front of a camera, just talking, in the near future. This means that video is now the most authentic form of content. In addition, video is also easier to consume and convey much more information than text in very short time span. This is why user-generated content on Youtube and Tiktok draws so much attention. It is unique, provides entertainment and sometimes even real value. It also saves time. Instead of sifting through text-based comparison sites, one can simply watch a video comparing between the two most popular action cameras or the latest version of running shoes. Video is harder to produce than text, and requires different skillset and character (not every writer will agree to be an “actor” on camera). But this challenges, once you overcome them, create a moat between your content and others.

No one can “plagiarize” your video, it is your own unique voice. Plus, a taking head video can be localized with ease by adding captions in the local language (AI does offer support in this task, but be careful and have a human verify it before publishing, otherwise you may encounter some unexpected, not-so-accurate translations.  

Another form of content that rates very highly in terms of authenticity is community-generated content. This is less structured than videos or posts, but if you look at a discussion (or “thread” taking place on a Reddit forum or Facebook community as a single piece of content it could be insightful, exciting, engaging and surely very, very authentic. The challenge for marketers is that these discussions cannot be controlled. There is no clear narrative and a some participants of the discussion might not like your company or product and be very vocal about it. Still- these platforms have huge followings and if you tread carefully you could reach these masses with your massage. Beware- redditors are notorious for flagging and banning commercial content, and they especially dislike links to external sites being posted on their groups with the sole aim of generating (meaning stealing) traffic.

So what will you do? Get a bot to create tons of non-significant, text-based content, or produce your own authentic content? I know what I’m going to do…